Most Teen Girls Still Pass on Team Sports

For active girls entering their teens, the choice seems to be the team or the TV.

Girls who continue in competitive sports can take advantage of the explosion in athletic opportunities brought about by Title IX, the federal legislation that requires equal access to athletics for both sexes.

But girls who don’t compete have few athletic options and what appears to be a powerful social pressure to drop out, said Patty S. Freedson, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. These young teens tend to give up exercise, she added.

“There’s a lot of paradox here,” Freedson said. “One group is motivated, the other is de-motivated.”

In 1994, 2.24-million high school girls played on school teams, Freedson said, citing figures from the National Federation of State High School Assns., the governing body for high school sports. This means that one girl in three participated, compared with one in 27 when Title IX was enacted 25 years ago, she said.

But girls who are not on teams are more likely than boys who are not on school teams to give up vigorous physical activity in general, Freedson said. By age 18, only about 30% of girls were active three days a week, compared with close to half of boys, she said.

“They are not now doing something that we know is good for you and [that] they once found fun,” Freedson said.

Why the girls drop out is not clear, she said. An intensification of competition in junior high and high school probably pushes out kids with lesser abilities, Freedson said, adding that there ought to be a middle ground between competition and doing nothing.

Schools and community groups should try to create one, said a report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Regular physical activity could reduce these teens’ risk of contracting chronic diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle in adulthood, the report said.

Comprehensive daily physical education should be required of students from kindergarten through 12th grade, the report said. But that physical education doesn’t have to be aimed at winning, it said.

Competitive sports “usually under-serve students who are less skilled, less physically fit and not attracted to competitive sports,” the report said. “One reason that participation in sports declines steadily during late childhood and adolescence is that undue emphasis is placed on competition.”

Dance works well for these girls, said researcher Russell R. Pate of the University of South Carolina. Track and field events might work well, too, because there is an event for just about every body type, said Pate, the report’s principal investigator.

And boys simply have more sports options in school than girls do, he said.

“When I was a kid, I was in competitive sports, but when I hit junior high age, I quit,” said Kristen Janikas, who works at Frog’s Athletic Club in Encinitas, Calif. “My P.E. teacher was a man who told us to walk the track and then do what we do best, which was to sit and talk.”

Janikas, 27, runs programs aimed at getting young teens through this crucial period. She teaches forms of exercise and how the body responds to them and and guides teens into adult-style health club workouts.

But one of the most important things the program does is give teens a way to feel comfortable with themselves as their bodies change, Janikas said.

“You don’t feel confident about your body because all these things are happening,” Janikas said. Girls “start to develop breasts and your period--all these things that freak you out. And the boys are noticing and making comments about your body.”

A love of dance led Janikas back into exercise, and she believes that noncompetitive activities can work for today’s teens as well.

“Here, we just want them to feel comfortable and confident about their muscles, and toning their body, and endurance, and things like that,” she said.